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JONATHAN EVISON is the author of All About Lulu, which won the 2009 Washington State Book Award, as well as the forthcoming novels, West of Here, and The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving. In 2009, he received a fellowship from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. He is the Executive Editor of The Nervous Breakdown, and an advisory editor at Knock. He blogs at Three Guys, One Book. He especially likes rabbits and beer.

First recorded in Chicago in 1994, this previously unreleased audio session with the renowned Robert Anton Wilson has been stored away for fifteen years…and almost lost entirely. If Bob knew how many synchronicities surround the rediscovery and release of this “lost” studio session, he would be chuckling in that half jolly, half mischievous way of his. If you believe in any kind of afterlife, maybe you can imagine him laughing right now. I like that image: Bob the laughing Buddha, still having one over on us from the great beyond. -Joseph Matheny (from the liner notes)

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BRAD LISTI (b. August 1, 1975) is the author of the Los Angeles Times bestselling novel Attention. Deficit. Disorder. and the founder of TheNervousBreakdown.com, an online literary community and publication featuring writers from around the world. He has a BFA from the University of Colorado and an MFA from the University of Southern California. He was raised in the Middle West, but his kinfolk are from the Deep South. He teaches creative writing and English composition at Santa Monica College, and he can be found online at Myspace, Facebook, and www.thenervousbreakdown.com.

Joseph Matheny in conversation with Rachel Haywire about the good old BBS days, music, art and all sorts of goodies. Since this is a special holiday show, they just talked and talked and talked, with no fascist concepts of clocks or calendars. Chaos Never Died!

Joseph Matheny in conversation with Jon Lebkowsy about the beginnings of the public Internet, hacking, phreaking and the rise and fall of the “C” word (Cyber) , social media and a host of other remembrances of recent history.

Joseph Matheny discussed the state of independent film and ponders some solutions to the “Internet dilemma” with his friend and partner, Michael Mailer. Also, a new episode of “In Your Ear” with Psuke.

Michael Mailer (born 1964) is a film producer and the oldest son of writer Norman Mailer. He has produced over 17 films. He has one sister Kate and two brothers Matthew and Stephen an actor. He is the co-founder of Bigel/Mailer films. He is married to Sasha Lazard and they have one son Cyrus. (wikipedia)

Steve Diet Goedde was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri and learned the basics of darkroom work and photography from his father, who was an amateur photographer. By the age of 13, Steve was obsessed with taking photographs and started educating himself about photographers that inspired him, most notably Richard Avedon, Lillian Bassman, and Diane Arbus.

He moved to Chicago in 1985 to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he studied filmmaking and painting. He refused to study photography stating that he had already acquired his aesthetic and visual style. Continue reading The GSpot: Steve “Diet” Goedde→

Also in this episode:A new In Your Ear with Psuke, and a special bonus track at the end: James Curcio presents the first installment of the Join My Cult audiobook, and releases Join My Cult as a Creative Commons PDF that you may download at Original Falcon. Also, as a side note, we were contacted after this show was recorded by an organization calling itself the New EII. Keep an eye open for an interview with them in the future.

As many of you know I collaborated on several projects with Dave over the years, sometimes playing characters in his productions, co-writing productions together and even contributed and collected pieces for his books. I considered him a friend and a stalwart individual and he will be missed in my life. Catch ya l8r bro.

In this very special edition of The GSpot, Joseph Matheny talks to Raymond Salvatore Harmon about the special release of his movie, The Philosopher’s Stoneon Greylodge as a torrent to be followed by a “Press to Play” version being released on Altertube.tv and Pilotlite.com, and then a podcast edition to be released on Alterati, Greylodge and Pilotlite. Joe and Ray discuss art on the fringe, how Ray came to film making, the Chicago art scene, and why the economy means nothing to artists working on the fringes.

Special on the street reports and mailbag. Gpod guy goes to the street to ask random people the questions: Have you heard of David Icke? Have you heard of the Reptilian conspiracy? Can you see the lizard people following me?

What happens when you walk around asking people a simple question: Do you know about the reptilian mind control conspiracy?

Mail Culture and Historical notes:In the late 70s and early 80s a network culture emerged that pre-dated information exchange via BBS/Fidonet/Internet (Arpanet) type networks. This was known as the “Mail Culture”. Using the guerrilla tactics of information networking started by such underground movements as the radical underground of the American 30’s, 50’s and 60’s and the Soviet Block ‘Samisdat” culture, the “Mail Culture” used the postal systems of the world to tie together outposts of radical/fringe thought and art into a loosely affiliated info-network. (All of course paying homage to the “chapbook” and “Pamphlet” cultures that sparked so many revolutions, including the American and French)

It worked like this: In the very early 80’s I became aware of a anarchist art collective in the Madison Wisconsin area known as “Xexoxial Endarchy” which for all intents and purposes functioned as a jumping off point for “Mail Culture” activity. One could write to XE, include a SASE, and receive in return a catalog (Xeroxed of course!) of weird pamphlets, catalogs and audio tapes of “experimental” music/sound collages, from the fringe of society (and beyond in some cases). Also, a list of names, addresses, and requirements (send us one of your things, we’ll send you one of ours, or send a SASE, etc.) which you would then add names of places/individuals that you had collected (as well your own)in the mix, make copies, and distribute in kind. I was putting out a xerox zine at the time called SNARF and used that as my coin to trade with. Over the course of a few years my collection of crackpot literature from this source grew to encompass 3 bookshelves. It is apparent from anyone who has been in contact with this culture that the first iterations of the Inunabula catalog as we know it today came from/was tailored for this underground movement. I put a xeroxed copy of the original color , in circulation in 1990/91 or so and watched several iterations of xerox of xerox of xerox- sans illustrations, plus new illustrations, appear from time to time in fringe science and crackpot literature catalogs, sometimes “for sale.It is still unclear who circulated the original color version and for what purpose.

Later, several compendium books appeared (late eighties, early nineties) that were commercially available such as:

Thanks so much for this! I’ve compared these to the color edition I have in a safe deposit box, as well as several other iterations I’ve seen and collected over the years and have the following to report:

Document 1. Xerox of a Xerox made from the original color catalog. By comparing a few markings made by scratches on the now ancient (heck, even then it was kinda old!) machine, I can tell that this is a Xerox made from a Xerox of the color brochure which I gave to a friend at Aries Arts in Capitola and which was sold for $2.00 (copy, handling, and postage costs) through a conspiracy mail-order catalog that the owners husband ran in the back.

I have seen several different versions of copies made from that original before, with artwork added, subtracted, etc. The main difference here from the original color is the puzzling absence of the other 13 pages of illustrations that was included with the color version. The cover of this one however is definitely a copy of the original cover. I can also attest to the fact that the text sections are exact replicas of the original color (done on a sandstone vellum bond). Maybe they left out the 13 pages of illustrations for the purpose of saving paper. Who knows?

I plan to make a high quality color PDF copy of my one and only color copy available in a few months to coincide with the release of some other material. All in all, this is still a cool collectors piece and I’ll put the copy you gave me in a polybag and store it with the rest of my “iterations” collection.

Document 2. This is not the original brochure but in fact a Xerox copy of the 1988 Edge Detector article. Note that is says (as I have said time and again in public) PLW’s admonition that he was merley “passing it on”.

A few years ago, I talked to a ranger at the Lebanon State Forest Ranger Station (some kind of tourist welcome center) and a lady who worked there told me that in fact a brochure that fit the description of the one in my possession had been in the racks for a while, but she was unclear where they had come from. This would have been mid-eighties or so by her recollection.

Since then two other people (Parsifal on DP and another lady who claimed to have known the Ashram residents) have repeated a similar story. Again, when I scan the color catalog, I will scan and include the copy of the brochure that I have in my possession.

Additional Notes: Originals-1 contains the Edge Detector version of the OH Brochure that is the origin of the “written by PLW” rumor, and on page 16 of the PDF, the illustration has a black and white reproduction of the actual cover of the brochure, bottom left of the page.

This is undoubtedly the version a certain psycho was passing around in the early nineties, with PLW’s name blacked out with a marker. I also remember him saying on the some long gone web-board that the “original” brochure had plans or a schematic inside. This is what he’s talking about, since he was obviously using the ED version. This “schematic” is an artisitic rendering, added by the publisher of Edge Detector and does not exist in the original brochure. Anyone who’s read the catalog and brochure would be able to recognize that this image in no way represents the vehicle described in those documents.

Since I was a lad I’ve admired beat literature and its developers. My young mind was taken with the romantic image of Kerouac roaming the interior of the body politic, a mad sweating virus on the loose in the highway vein of Amerika, Ginsberg holy maniac,chanting, praying, exorcising a generation ruined by madness, Burroughs and Gysin, pushing the envelope, rubbing out the word, and di Prima, conjuring, straddling the magick/dream line, throwing us bits of tasty metamorsels and sumptuous subconscious feasts from the other side.

Diane di Prima is a San Francisco writer and poet who also works in healing, Magick, and Alchemy .some of here recent books are:Recollections of My Life as a Woman The New York Years, Pieces of a Song -Collected Poems, Zip Code, and Seminary Poems. See a complete list here.

I spoke to Diane in her cozy book lined San Francisco apartment. We spoke of rebellion, liberty, conditioning, and on being a women in the beat generation.This is a transcript of our recorded conversation.

JM: When you started out as a writer in the 50′s, were there a lot of control systems set up to punish anyone who tried to break out the consensus mold?

DD: It was a weird time. Especially for women. Rebellion was kind of expected of men.

JM: When men rebelled they were romantic, free. Women who rebelled were categorized as being nuts.

DD: Yes. Nuts or a whore, or something. Yes.

JM: Do you feel it’s any different now?

DD: Not much. I think there’s been a lot of lip service paid to how much women have managed to advance. The younger women that I know are behaving pretty much like women have always behaved. Maybe they don’t have so much of the middle class housewife dream, but they’ll still be the one to get a job, while the man does the writing or the painting or whatever. I can think of example after example of this. I think that the internal control systems that have been put in place for women haven’t been dented. It’s such a big step forward to single mom, but so much more could be going on besides that.

JM: That’s where the most effective censorship and control systems reside, inside ourselves, our head!

DD: Yes! How it gets there is interesting too.

JM: How do you think they get there?

DD: I would guess that it starts in the womb. Getting imprinted with the language pattern that’s around you. The way people move, the way they hold themselves. To break it you’d have to do some really deliberate debriefing, on every level. The place where I was lucky in my own life was that I had a grandfather who was an anarchist. I didn’t see much of him after I was 7 because my parents thought he was bad for me, but from 3 to 7 I saw a lot of him. I was still malleable enough so some debriefing occurred there. He would tell me these really weird fables about the world. He would read Dante to me and take me to the old peoples anarchist rallies, and all this showed me these other possibilities.

JM: So you had an early imprint of a kind of… anti-authority, authority figure. (laughs)

DD: (laughing) Yes! Aside from being an anti-authority authority figure, the imprint that I got from him and my grandmother as well, was of two people who weren’t afraid, at least from my child’s point of perspective. They would just go ahead and do what they believed in. In all the other years of my early life I never encountered anyone else who wasn’t afraid. I think kids today may be a little better off in that they encounter a few people who either aren’t afraid, or who will go ahead and try something anyway, whatever it is. There’s a possibility of that model, but during my childhood that was a very unusual model.

I was born in 1934, during the Depression, and everyone seemed to befrozenwithterror. We…..will….do… what….we….are….told! (laughs) and I don’t think it’s changed that much. Every day people are told that they should be afraid of not having health insurance, they’re going to die in the gutter, and to be afraid of all these things that aren’t threats at the moment. Of course there are present threats but nobody’s paying attention to those.

JM: It seems to me that rebellion itself has become a commodity, the media has co-opted rebellions like rock-n-roll, Dada, Surrealism, poetry, the rebel figure. Do you feel that this co-opting has succeeded in making rebellion somewhat ineffectual?

DD: No. What you’re seeing is an old problem in the arts. Everything is always co-opted, and as soon as possible. As Cocteau used to talk about, you have to be a kind of acrobat or a tightrope walker. Stay 3 jumps ahead of what they can figure out about what you’re doing, so by the time the media figures out that your writing, say, women and wolves, your on to finishing your Alchemical poems or something. It’s not just a point of view of rebellion or outdoing them, or anything like that. It’s more a point of view of how long can you stay with one thing. Where do you want to go? You don’t want to do anything you already know or that you’ve already figured out. So it comes naturally to the artist to keep making those jumps, that is, if they don’t fall into the old “jeez, I still don’t own a new microwave” programs.

JM: Reminds me of a story about Aldous Huxley. When asked if he had read all the books in his quite impressive library he replied, “God no! Who would want a library full of books that they had already read?”

DD: (laughs) It is true that rebellion is co opted, but then it always gets out of their hands, it slithers in some other direction. Then they go “oh, how can we make this part of the system?” Like rap. OK, they are co-opting all this regular rap, but now this surreal rap is starting, native tongue, surreal imagery, spiritual anarchism rap, it’s not about girls or politics or race and it’s starting to happen.

JM: Is this something your daughter brings to your attention?

DD: Yes, I go over once in awhile and catch up on what’s going on. You see as soon as something is defined, it wiggles off in another direction. I don’t think that it’s such a big problem in the sense of reaching a lot of people. How does the artist reach a large audience? The people that know are always going to find the new edge, but the mainstream are not that smart or the guy making a top 40 record is not that smart. It often takes them a long time to figure it out. Now that is a problem, because we don’t have the time. We need to reach everybody, right away, because we have to stop the system dead in its tracks. It’s no longer a question of dismantling the system. There isn’t enough time to take it apart, we just have to stop it.

JM: Do you feel that there’s a somewhat centralized or conscious attempt to defuse radical art or rebellion through co-option, or is it just “the nature of the beast”, so to speak?

DD: I think it goes back and forth. There are times when it’s conscious, but not a single hierarchical conspiracy but rather a hydra-headed conspiracy. Then there are other times that it doesn’t need to be conscious anymore, because that’s the mold, that pattern has been set, so everyone goes right on doing things that way. I’m not quite sure which point we’re at right now in history. It’s so transitional and crazy that I wouldn’t hazard a guess. Just check your COINTELPRO history to see an example of a conscious conspiracy to stop us. Other times it was just a repetition of what has gone on before. Like the ants going back to where the garbage used to be. (laughs)

JM: Robotic functioning.

DD: Yes, and it’s all in place when the next so called conspiracy comes along, which is very handy, isn’t it? I Wonder how we’ve made this monster we have here?

JM: OK. Say we stop it dead in its tracks. What then?

DD: It would be nice to say it’s unimaginable, wouldn’t that be great. That would be my hope! (laughs) For one thing, we’d have to use the same tables, wear the same shoes longer, read a lot of the same books, maybe for the next few hundred years. Dumps would become valuable places to mine!

JM: They already are to me!

DD: To some people, yes, but not to enough people. Screeching to a halt seems like the only possible solution and I’m not even sure how you would go about it. Of course the good old general strike would be a nice start.

JM: As long as we’re on the subject of deconstructing, how do you feel about the predominant intellectual fad of postmodernism, deconstruction, and the nihilism implicit in these systems?

DD: Well, when I read that stuff, it’s so frustrating. Western thought always keeps stopping on the brink. It never really makes that extra step. It could really do with an infusion of Buddhist logic. At least 4-fold logic and then what’s beyond that. It seems that although it’s dressed up in new language, nothing really new has happened in philosophy in the 20th century. Well, maybe not since Wittgenstein. It seems like the same old thing. You know, sometimes when people ask me for poems now, I’ll send out poems that have been lying around for years, I don’t always have new poems lying around everywhere, and these things that I wrote as cut-up stuff, cutting up each others’ dreams in workshops and such. I’ll send these out. Everyone seems to be taking them very seriously and publishing them. They think I’m working off of some language theory when actually these are just things I did for fun.

JM: What are you doing now?

DD: I’m working on 2 prose books. One is called “Recollections of My Life as a Women”. I’m 120 pages into it and I’m still 8 years old. I’m still dealing with how the conditioning happened. In my generation a lot of it happened with battering, you got hit a lot, and screaming. Your basic conditioning came through abuse, not really different from concentration camps or anything else. I think someday we’re going to look back on how we’re handling kids at this point in history and wonder how we could treat them such. Like when people say “How could women stand it when people did such and such?” We’ll be saying that about the way children are treated. [Note- Since this interview this book has been completed and published ]

JM: What’s the other book?

DD: The other prose book is called “Not Quite Buffalo Stew”. It’s just a rollicking, fun, surreal novel about life in California. It’s in the first person, and in the 2nd or 3rd chapter in I found out that the “I” that was the narrator was a man, so that breaks a lot of rules already. The “I” is a drug smuggler named Lynx. There isn’t a whole lot of continuity, just whatever scenes wanted to write themselves.

JM: Are you using any kind or random/divination systems, i.e., cut-ups, grab bag, I Ching, Tarot, coin tossing, etc.?

DD: Not with this one. This one dictates itself. The system I guess I’m using is that I can’t write it at home. It won’t happen anywhere that’s familiar turf and it likes to happen while I’m driving. So I’ll probably head for Nevada at some point and finish it.

JM: What do you see in the future for poetry and literature?

DD: I would like to see authors really use Magick to reach themes. I’d like to see more work coming out of visioning and trance. I’m really tired of reading about human beings! There’s all these other beings, I’d like to see a real dimensional jump and I’d like to see people working on the technical problems. Like when you come back from trance or visioning, or drugs, and what you can write down about it at that moment. What you can make into an actual piece, we haven’t figured it out yet. Yeats certainly didn’t figure it out. It’s more than needing a new language. There are actual forms we need to find or the forms have to find us, that will hold all that material without trying to make it reductive. The attempts at visionary painting in the 60′s and Yeats’ last poems show how vision didn’t translate into these old artistic forms. Of course taking the raw material and presenting that as a piece doesn’t work either. Maybe a blending of vision, word, and sounds can achieve something. We haven’t really had time to think about what the computer is. Most of us still think of it as a typewriter, or a calculator. We don’t think of it as its own dimension. It has its own medium, possibilities, to bring this kind of material across. I also think about deliberate invocation to find the plane or thing you want to write about.

JM: Do you see us as heading into a post-literate society?

DD: Yes, we might be. I don’t think that will stop poetry, in fact it won’t stop any of the arts at all. Even if it’s oral there may be a split like there was in Europe when there was the written literature in Latin and then there was the oral poems of the singers in the Vulgate. We have that to a degree already with the poetry of the great songwriters. Really though, I don’t think literate or post-literate really matters. Were cave paintings literate or pre-literate? Did they read those paintings or just look at them? (laughs) Of course the only reason a completely literate society was developed was for thought control, and now that thought control can be done via TV, etc., it’s not really needed anymore. They don’t want everyone reading Schoepenhauer!

Everyone needs to remember that they can buy a small press or laser writer, or copy machine, and go home and do what the fuck they please and it will take a very long time for anyone to catch up with them all! No one seems to remember about a few years ago in Czechoslovakia, without access to all this technology like we have here, even with every one of their typewriters registered to the police, they still managed to publish their work! In order to do this they would they would type it with 10 carbon papers to make 10 copies! We are in a situation here in the US where no one can register all the computers, no one can figure out where all the copy machines are. Get one now! Remember we can do it without government money. Government money is poison, take it when you need it, but don’t get hooked. We can say what we want. They can’t possibly keep up with us all. Real decentralization!

JM: That’s great, helping people to find their true desires, but do you think that we’re so full of false, spectacle manufactured desires that we can no longer identify our true desires?

DD: I think it doesn’t take that long to deprogram false desires. Anyone who knows that they have the desire to know that about themselves, what their true desires are, will find the tools to do it. Drugs, auto-hypnosis, you could also do it by following the false desires until they lead to a dead end like Blake recommended…

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Joseph Matheny

Joseph Matheny is a pseudonym used by a plethora of evolutionary intelligence agents throughout the galaxy. Like Monty Cantsin, Luther Blisset or Saint Germain, you never know when or where he’s going to pop up. He is rumored to never sleep, moonlight as a technology consultant, daylight as a fireproof vampire, live by the motto: Non Serviam! and almost never fail to leave a ticking time bomb behind.

What he does:

Joseph is a “Hypermedium” who believes that Occam’s Razor is not a disposable. Joseph Matheny is a Curator, Contributor and Producer of seditious sites like Greylodge , and Alterati. Joseph seems to be a verb. Joseph Matheny is an Internet litterbug, leaving flotsam and jetsam all over, to hopefully act like a message in a bottle. If you read it, you will be infected. If you are infected you will be InFicted. If you are InFicted, you will get UnFucted. Meanwhile, Joseph is holding himself hostage until all his demands are met.

The flood will lift the ghosts from the Hollywood lawn cemetery and they will disappear like ether in the now dead air. All the names will be erased from the billboards and the theatres and the piers and the magazines and the monuments. You live by myths of immortality, and your myths are not safe. - Robert Montgomery

"We still have some time to take advantage of the fact that radio and television stations are not yet guarded by the army.” -Guy Debord.

metalepsis \Met`a*lep"sis\, n.; pl. Metalepses. [L., fr. Gr. ? participation, alteration, fr. ? to partake, to take in exchange; ? beyond + ? to take.] (Rhet.) The continuation of a trope in one word through a succession of significations, or the union of two or more tropes of a different kind in one word. A literary term indicating an extreme type of mixed metaphor -- the extreme compression of a sequence of allusions, tropes or other figures into an image or space normally too small to accommodate them all without sacrificing a degree of sense, leading to even more intricate convulsions of meaning.

“Quit your complaining. It’s not the world’s fault that you wanted to be an artist. It’s not the world’s job to enjoy the films you make, and it’s certainly not the world’s obligation to pay for your dreams. Nobody wants to hear it. Steal a camera if you have to, but stop whining and get back to work.” -Werner Herzog

“…to vanish without having to kill yourself may be the ultimate revolutionary act…” The Sacred Jihad of Our Lady of Chaos

“The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first.”
― Jim Morrison

“There is in every madman
a misunderstood genius
whose idea
shining in his head
frightened people
and for whom delirium was the only solution
to the strangulation
that life had prepared for him.”
― Antonin Artaud

“I would like to write a Book which would drive men mad, which would be like an open door leading them where they would never have consented to go, in short, a door that opens onto reality.”
― Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings

“My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky.”
― Alan Moore

“Stood in firelight, sweltering. Bloodstain on chest like map of violent new continent. Felt cleansed. Felt dark planet turn under my feet and knew what cats know that makes them scream like babies in night.

Looked at sky through smoke heavy with human fat and God was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever and we are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later. Born from oblivion; bear children, hell-bound as ourselves, go into oblivion. There is nothing else.

Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It’s us. Only us. Streets stank of fire. The void breathed hard on my heart, turning its illusions to ice, shattering them. Was reborn then, free to scrawl own design on this morally blank world.

Was Rorschach.

Does that answer your Questions, Doctor?”
― Alan Moore, Watchmen

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape. ”
― William S. Burroughs

“I am not one of those weak-spirited, sappy Americans who want to be liked by all the people around them. I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it. My affections, being concentrated over a few people, are not spread all over Hell in a vile attempt to placate sulky, worthless shits.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Journalism is just a gun. It’s only got one bullet in it, but if you aim right, that’s all you need. Aim it right, and you can blow a kneecap off the world.”
― Warren Ellis, Transmetropolitan, Vol. 1: Back on the Street

“If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.”
― Charles Bukowski, Factotum

“You have to die a few times before you can really
live.”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.”
― Henry Miller

“What I am trying to do when I use symbols is to awaken in your unconscious some reaction. I am very conscious of what I am using because symbols can be very dangerous. When we use normal language we can defend ourselves because our society is a linguistic society, a semantic society. But when you start to speak, not with words, but only with images, the people cannot defend themselves.”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky

“And I imagine... with great pleasure... all the horrible stirrings of the nonmanifested to bring forth the scream which creates the universe. Maybe one day I'll see you trembling, and you'll go into convulsion and grow larger and smaller until your mouth opens and the world will come from your mouth, escaping through the window like a river, and it will flood the city. And then we'll begin to live. ”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky

O gentlemen, the time of life is short!
To spend that shortness basely were too long,
If life did ride upon a dial's point,
Still ending at the arrival of an hour.
An if we live, we live to tread on kings;
If die, brave death, when princes die with us!
- Hotspur, Henry IV Part I

"The first requirement for any piece of writing is that it must be alive" F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?" - Henry David Thoreau

“Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.”
― R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience/The Bird of Paradise

"You're free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning." - Stanley Kubrick

‘There are three mental states that interest me,” said Amanda…”one, amnesia, two euphoria, and three, ecstacy. Amnesia is not knowing who one is and wanting desperately to find out. Euphoria is not knowing who one is and not caring. Ecstasy is knowing exactly who one is—and not caring.” -Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction

People think that it’s just them, that they have financial problems, emotional problems… but I say, “I don’t trust people who aren’t depressed and confused.” How can you possibly not be depressed and confused in the world that we’re living? If you’re depressed and confused, you’re on the right track. - Penny Arcade

“It’s only when you realize that life is taking you nowhere that it begins to have meaning.” – P. D. Ouspensky

"It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield."
- W.B. Yeats

“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
― Charles Bukowski

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
― Ernest Hemingway